Or maybe there was a touch of wariness, of apprehension, of fear and even dread, as you dove, once again, into the unknowable.

Whatever that feeling in your tummy was, there was no denying it. It was there and it was tangible and it churned up on the Tuesday after Labour Day.

Some of our remaining Depression Baby colleagues (b. 1929-39) have no trouble floating back in deep time and recalling the famous feeling.

We’re surprised that they can, really, considering some days they can’t even remember at 2 p.m. what they had for lunch, or whether they had any lunch at all.

But they do. They remember.

Several, who were career teachers, still get the old butterflies on the Tuesday morning after Labour Day, even after well over 20 years of being retired.

We go over how it was, how it all turned out, our failures and successes, the river of kids that flowed by for 35 years, ah, whatever happened to them all ... then we roll over and go back to sleep.

One of the many perks that went with the job of teaching was that you were handed a brand-new start every year.

Once a year you felt renewed, cleansed, even forgiven. There was always the irrepressible feeling of rejuvenation in the school building in September.

What everybody was sick and tired of last spring was suddenly there, to be loved all over again, this fall.

New girlfriends, new boyfriends, new teammates, new teachers, fresh faces, summer adventures recounted and embellished, who’s in, who’s out, who’s back, who’s new, who got knocked up, what’s the latest, have you seen so-and-so, new books, clean binders, new friends, old foes, who’s the new vice-principal ...

New leaves to turn over and clean slates to start with for students and teachers alike.

And the remarkable thing about teenagers is that even if you met them the previous year, there’s always something new about them in September.

For example, you thought you knew the grade-niner when he was a pimply-faced, frog-throated knucklehead. But this year, he’s changed.

This year he’s a manly-voiced, broader-shouldered, pseudo-sophisticated knucklehead.

And remember the girl, when she arrived last fall from Grade 8, who was a Bambi-legged, Chatty Cathy scatterbrain? Now she’s undergone a miraculous metamorphosis.

Now she’s a sturdy, serene, calm-voiced, womanly scatterbrain with new hair.

And that Grade 9 misfit whose hands and feet were way too big for his body has returned and look at him, he’s hardly recognizable.

Now he’s disguised as a six-foot-four, half-starved rooster that’s just been given a dangerous jolt of electricity. His skull is shaved except for a beautiful flame-coloured, six-inch fan of stiffened hair which travels from his forehead back to his nape. He has to duck to get in the classroom door.

When asked how long it takes to get dressed for school in the morning he says his mom has to get him up at 4 a.m.

Cool.

His eyelashes are double size and his fingernails are long and black, featuring miniature stencils of different kinds of spiders. His teeth are black and his lips are sky blue to accent his ears, which are navy.

Like Jacob Marley, he drags behind him a long, heavy, link chain which is cinched to his waist by a giant padlock.

One pant leg, yellow, is torn off just below the knee. His broomstick leg descends into an enormous work boot. His other pant leg is blue and is so long you can’t see any foot there at all.

His shirt is two shirts, somehow stitched together. On the crotch of his pants are painted colourful, substantial, male genitalia.

The vice-principal hates him. There are many reasons for this feeling on the part of the vice-principal, the main one being what is printed on our changeling’s eyelids. When those big eyelashes shut down, the vice-principal reads, from left to right, the universal imprecation, loathed and feared by vice-principals the world over, the words: F — K YOU.

A priceless perquisite that can come with the job of high school teacher is chance encounters with these knuckleheads and scatterbrains and misfits after not too much time has passed, when they have been reincarnated, metamorphized into solid, sensible, strong, resourceful-minded Canadians of all walks in this lucky country.

And when they call hello at you across the street with their own little ones (soon to be knuckleheads, scatterbrains and misfits) trailing behind, it is the happiest of moments, indeed.

Yes, there are signs of new beginnings everywhere on the Tuesday after Labour Day.

The white lines in the teachers’ parking lot have been repainted. There’s fresh sod on the playing field, new cinder on the track, the floors of the classrooms and halls have been waxed and polished.

There are new numbers on the lockers in the basement, the gym floor has been brightly re-stencilled and the old, brown cafeteria trays have been replaced with new, bright orange ones.

And speaking of the colour orange, the woodwork teacher’s nose is even bigger and brighter than it was last year!

Varied are the reactions you get when you ask people what the phrase “back to school” conjures up for them.

One colleague remembers a sign he saw one September in the Lafayette Tavern before that storied beer parlour became politically correct.

The sign read:

ON SPECIAL!

BACK TO SCHOOL DRAFTS!

Another, a Second World War army veteran, recalls the otherworldly feeling of returning to Canada in 1946, after months of combat in Italy, to find himself in night school, sitting in a row-desk with a small round hole in it where an obsolete inkwell once was, in a Grade 12 classroom, in the Collegiate Institute, staring at a blackboard, waiting for a bell to ring.

My personal reaction upon hearing the phrase “back to school,” strangely enough, embodies the image of a grasshopper.

Grade 9, first day, first class at the Collegiate Institute was General Science.

First topic in General Science was insects. The main insect that we “took” was the grasshopper. The first test we had was to label the parts of the grasshopper on a drawing for 10 marks.

I got two out of 10. A bad start in high school.

I had to do the test over again.

Then there was the very same question on the Christmas exam. For 10 marks, label the grasshopper.

Then our General Science teacher died.

Our new science teacher, for some unknown reason, started all over again with the grasshopper. We had the same test again and then, once again, it turned up on the Easter exam.

I was getting pretty good at it. Getting fives and sometimes sixes out of 10.

Of course, it was on the final exam as well.

I got 10 out of 10 on the grasshopper that June but not much in anything else and failed General Science.

I failed all my other subjects, too, and had to repeat Grade 9 wherein we started all over again studying the goddam grasshopper in General Science.

By the end of my second year in Grade 9 nobody in the world was better than I was at naming the parts of a grasshopper.

To this day, whenever I see a grasshopper, I think of its parts.

And a slight smile curls my maxillae labia and my meta-thorax swells with pride at the memory of getting 10 out of 10 in something at the Collegiate Institute.

Getting back to school is so exciting that it is always difficult to get the teenagers’ attention right away.

Many teachers make the classic mistake of trying to explain rules and regulations and expectations on the first day.

Bad idea.

Kids don’t hear a word you say for the first whole week of school, so don’t waste your breath.

On that first exciting day they will pile into your room and predictably grab a seat, always with their friends, and begin immediately to size you up.

These people are professionals. They’ve had eight years or more of hands-on training in sizing up teachers. There’s nobody better at it so you must protect yourself.

Any teacher who begins by saying a pleasant good morning, who is affable and personable and allows them to retain the seats they have strategically chosen is in for, as they say these days, a world of hurt.

Instead, take the boys who have chosen to sit in the back row and put them in the front row.

And never, ever explain.

Then, take the brown-nosers who have chosen the front seats and stick them in the back.

Then, spend the rest of the week revealing nothing whatsoever to them about yourself or your intentions except that your silence communicates that you loathe them all and don’t give a professional damn what happens to them.

Then, next week sometime, after they are totally mystified, demoralized and confused, feel free to become yourself.

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